I wonder how many ways modconf can break.... sigh... well, I
released another version, hopefully it'll work. drow got
powerpc boot-floppies to work, so it looks like we're pretty
much ready to release 2.2.11. Mostly just waiting for the
word from aph now. There seems to be some problems with the
kernel/pcmcia modules dependencies still; I wonder what's
going on there.... my vmware license expired, and I don't
really feel like paying $299 for one. There are still lots
of minor glitches with boot-floppies. In some ways I'm
continually amazed that it actually works. It'll be
interesting to see what we can do in woody. I expect some
fairly substantial, if not a total, rewrite.

Compiled some ia64 stuff at work. Basically I'm just trying
to get a few simple tools going. dpkg compiles (mostly),
except it depends on perl, which I don't yet have. perl in
turns depend on gdbm.... then i decided I wanted to get wget
to make it easier to download sources. Turns out you have to
force a -D_GNU_SOURCE for wget to compile correctly (took me
about 30 minutes to figure that out ): ). Well, wget depends
on gettext, which uses libtool, which is just utterly stupid
and refuses to work with ia64 without lots of tinkering...

Anyway, I was in the middle of compiling gettext when my
connection died... <sigh> Fun stuff, eh?

oh, and apt also mostly compiles, except that there seems to
be a g++ parsing bug upstream. Hopefully that'll get fixed
soon.

Evening

Am looking into php more to see if we should do db.d.o-NG in
perl or php. php makes things a bit simplier in some cases,
but lacks strong encyption support (it seems). For perl,
with the new IPC::SharedCache stuff we can probably make a
more secured system, but I'm a bit worried about how to
properly garbage collect stale entries (similar problems
with doing this in php). I'd also like to figure out a way
to do LDAP (and possibly some SQL backend) connection
pooling either with PHP or mod_perl.... hm.... is it even
possible?

I guess all you C++ gurus out there will think this is
obvious, but I thought it was pretty neat :-)

I still need to do some tests to determine the space/time
efficiency of this system though. Oh well.

(Some time later...)
Culus has sort of convinced me that this won't work if a
widget wants to have multiple events of the same type, but
in different queues. He plugged the deity system as being
more flexible. It is better in some ways, but I really do
not like the void * event parameter that is used in so many
widget libraries.... <sigh>. Is there really no
perfect solution?

I've been putting it off, but I think I need to rethink the
db.d.o code and redo a lot of it.... hm...

Been thinking about how to write a good event manager for
the widget library I'm working on. I'm still experimenting
with a few things. I'd like to have a strongly typed
system, but being able to do that cleanly and efficiently
has proven to be rather difficult.

for some odd reason I've been thinking about going back to
school. Not full time, but if I can manage to organize
something so that I can do it part time that'd be awesome.
I guess I had a slightly different perspective about
college than some of the other postings I've seen here.
Obviously, it depends on where you want to go and what you
want to do. Certainly, going to college can open some extra
doors; for example, my current employer only hires (for
SW engineers) college grads; but then, I've also had many
successful entrepreneurs tell me that spending time in
school is a waste of time; that I'd be better off joining
startups or what not.

For someone like me who can't seem to make up his mind
about what he wants to do, I guess college gave me an
opportunity to explore lots of different areas that I
wouldn't have a chance to do now. For instance, college has
changed my perspective on many topics (databases,
compilers) that formerly seem dry and uninteresting, but
now represent some of my core interests in computers.

Anyway, I'll stop babbling now. Back to HHGTG...

P.S. Outlook sucks. It took about 45 minutes to load over
DSL (60kB/s) before it let me read my mail at work :(

I wish someone would fix the date code so it reflects the
original post date if an entry gets edited....

Another interesting day in training. Sometimes I feel these
evil urges to build a VB like environment for Linux..
hm.... yes, I am slowly being brainwashed. Does this mean
my certification level will drop to dimwit?

On a more interesting note, I've been learning more about
compilers and am thinking about writing one for fun.
Haven't really learned anything specifically for OO
languages though; wonder what sorts of OO-specific
optimizations there are. hm...

Am reading HHGTG again for the third time. It's still as
funny as ever! I finished my third Neal Stephenson book
in the past couple of weeks (Diamond Age). It's decent, but
IMHO
Crytonomicon is definitely the best. Maybe I'll start on
Heinlein next...

Ran into another Debian developer in the Phoenix area on
IRC tonight. That makes three of us now. Cool... maybe we
can take over the local LUG meeting :-)

Hrm, looks like my FA classes didn't quite sink in.
<sigh> the question was: is there a way to strip
shell-style comments (# blah). As it turns out, this perl
regexp does the trick.... (from bod)

s/^((([^\\"#]+|"[^\\"]*(\\.[^\\"]*)*")*|(\\.)*)*)(#.*)?/$1/

I had argued that you cannot do this with a standard (FA)
regular expression, but as aj pointed out to me, this
shouldn't be the case. So, as an exercise for the reader,
rewrite that in
a form that sed recognizes.... :-)

So I have a question: why would anyone care and want to
read what I did today?

Am attending a Microsoft MTS class this week (please, no
rotten eggs...). One of the things we discussed was that
reliability and scalability are mutually exclusive; you
cannot have one without the other. Seems like many MS users
do take that for granted.

Been trying to recuperate from a rather bad case of carpal
tunnel. It comes and goes; for some reason, I never had
problems when I was back in school, and I definitely did a
lot more typing back then.. hmmm....

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